The Media Who Cried Flu

During the early stages of reporting about this new swine flu pandemic, I found myself not paying much attention. It seems that every few years now the media is trotting out stories about some new germ or virus that will destroy us all. Remember SARS? Recall the unease over the avian flu? You barely hear about them now. Heck, I rarely hear about AIDS anymore and that actually killed people I knew. Every time I checked the news online, multiple headlines were dealing with the swine flu (CNN had 3-4 swine flu headlines running at the same time at one point). There were news stories about how handshaking might become a thing of the past because now there is SWINE FLU! Swine flu was going to change the way we lived forever.

Even with two young kids to worry about, I found myself disinterested in the swine flu stories and unable to take them seriously. Our news media has cried wolf too many times for me to take them seriously about something like this. They are so quick to spread fearful stories before getting all the facts. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, news stories come out that the swine flu is no worse than (gasp) the regular plain old flu which kills 36,000 Americans a year. In other words... no need to panic. It's not a good thing, but your world isn't going to turn into Stephen King's The Stand either.

One last gasp of the swine flu story is that it might combine with the avian flu (see story here) I think that we should call the avian/swine flu offspring "flying pig flu." It will at least make it more entertaining when the media is trying to panic its audience.

Nightmares and Hallucinations

Kyra woke up just a bit ago from a nightmare. She had a bad dream in which she was being chased by Sideshow Bob from The Simpsons. It is odd how most of her bad dreams seem to be caused by animation. She used to regularly have nightmares about Dora the Explorer and Go, Diego, Go.

We recently discovered that, like her father, Kyra has sleep hallucinations. Early last week, she woke up shrieking because her bed was covered in insects only she could see. At least she isn't sleep-walking like my brother and I did when we were young. I've read up on night terrors, hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations and sleep paralysis. None of them really seem to fit what my daughter and I experience. The experience is not always a frightening one. In all but one instance I've been able to move freely and talk while having the hallucinations. They also happen in the middle of my sleep cycle rather than at the beginning or end as with hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations. I've experienced both of those (mainly the former) and they really don't compare with the hallucinations I get in the middle of the night.

As a child, I would wake to find "ghosts" in my room. I could tell that I was no longer sleeping and felt awake, only there would be things in my room that shouldn't have been. An example: One night at age eight I woke up to see a man standing alongside my bed, staring out my window. The man, who didn't seem to notice me, was completely the same shad of white, from his hair to his skin to his clothes; the details of his appearance were black lines as if the man had been drawn on paper. He stood between my bed and my brother's crib. Frightened, I pulled the covers over my head so that he couldn't see me. I managed to fall back to sleep. Later, I awoke, suffocating under my blankets. I dared a peek out from under the bed clothes, only to see that the man had been replaced with a woman who was completely black with white lines, almost like a film negative. She was hanging by a noose in the same spot. As I stared in horror, she rotated on her creaking rope, so that she faced toward me. Her face was swollen and her tongue protruded from her mouth. I dove back under my covers and did not emerge until there was sunlight. It didn't help that I'd never heard of sleep hallucinations and was raised by a mother who was convinced that I was seeing actual ghosts... just like she did.

In my early 20s I terrified my ex-wife one night when I hallucinated a wraith in our bedroom that was trying to get her. She woke up to find me over her prone body, wrestling with something she could not see. The "wraith" evaporated in moments. It was the first time I began to get a clue about what was really happening. The wraith had been a dead ringer for the ones in Patrick Swayze flick Ghost that I'd watched earlier that week on cable. I was able to get back to sleep, but she spent the rest of the night awake and scared that something supernatural was coming to get her. It is the only instance where a nightmare I had caused someone else more fear than me.

Over time my hallucinations have changed to primarily be animals. I've woken up to a tarantula tickling my lip and to feel water dripping on my head, only to look up and see that the water was dripping from a dead rat that is now plunging toward my face. Those times caused me to throw back my blankets, startling our cats. Kristy has adjusted pretty well to it over the years, and carries on conversations with me while in this waking-sleep state. Once she woke to me telling her not to move, because I could see a cobra coiled between us, swaying its hooded head back and forth. She held a conversation with me during one of the few non-threatening hallucinations once. I was sitting up and staring over the edge of the bed at a glowing starfish that was crawling around the floor, playing with my sneakers and probing at the clothes laying next to the bed. I'd seen the movie Minority Report earlier that day. The star fish resembled one of the little robots that scurry about in that film.

I explained the hallucination thing to Kyra as best I could. She's still a bit too young to fully grasp the concept, but at least she's not going to spend decades thinking that a trick of the mind passed down through genetics is something supernatural and scary like I did for far too long.

The Ice Cream Horror

Eli had his second doctors appointment earlier this week. He'd gained two inches and more than two pounds since his appointment two weeks earlier. He's growing like the chicken heart from that old radio play.

We recently bought Kyra a novelty ice cream treat that she picked out for herself. It was supposed to look like Spongebob, but instead we revealed a monstrosity upon opening the ice cream wrapper. It is the first time ice cream has given me chills without eating it. Kyra was brave enough to eat it though. I took a picture first. Is it just me, or is this thing just evil looking?



Kyra didn't care for the gumball eyes. She chewed them briefly and then spat out a dark blue goo with tiny hard gum chunks into the bowl we had to catch the icecream drips.

Tall People: Slaves to Our Tiny Masters

A question for you other tall folks out there: Have you noticed that short people think we're there to do their bidding? How many times have you heard, "Hey. I can't reach that. Can you get it for me?" What are we, some sort of service animals for the vertically challenged?

When is the last time you heard a tall person ask a short person to grab something from a lower shelf because they don't have as far to stoop? Never! We'd get kicked in the shins.

The short people have lured us into a trap by making us believe that being tall is "cool." It has conditioned us to respond to their requests as some sort of demonstration of our height superiority... but who is calling the shots here? It's a conspiracy and it's bigger than you might imagine.

I did some research and I found out that short people are physically superior to us. That's right. If you visit Short Persons Support.org, you'll find a whole list of abilities short people have. According to the site, short people have the advantage on tall people when it comes to physics and biology. The site claims that short people have "faster reaction times, greater ability to accelerate body movements, stronger muscles in proportion to body weight, greater endurance, and the ability to rotate the body faster. They are also less likely to break bones in falling." Holy crap! Shortness is like a super power!

That's not all, the web site goes on to say that short people live longer lives. It explains that because human cells have a limited capacity for duplication, short people have an advantage at healing.

"Since bigger people require a larger number of duplications to reach maturity, they have fewer potential cell doublings left to replace defective or dead cells. Thus, the functional capability of vital organs declines with advanced age because damaged cells can't be replaced. A new study also showed that oxidative damage to cells increases at a higher rate with increasing height; e.g., an 18% increase in height leads to an 83% increase in cellular damage. Current gerontological thinking is that oxidative damage leads to aging and death."

Alright, so now short people have heightened agility, heightened strength, heightened endurance (not to mention their greater ability to hide from danger in small places) and now they have some sort of anti-aging healing factor power like Wolverine! Oh...but we're not done yet. The site says there are also studies that show that short people get cancer less than tall people and are less likely to have cardiovascular problems. To add further insult to injury the web site then claims that short people have less of a negative impact on the planet than us tall people. Apparently, us tall folks now have to feel guilt because we cause more pollution and use up more resources.

I've recently been reading about physics and the concept of time dilation. Time dilation is a phenomenon in which time goes slower the closer you are to a source of gravity. Experiments have shown that clocks that are in sync with each other will go out of sync if one is at a higher elevation than the other. The clock that is closer to the ground will run behind, because apparently time is going slower there. So does this mean that time is going slower for short people than for me? I remember how slow time seemed to be when I was a kid. Now, I'm tall and time is whizzing by!

Conclusion: Short people have ultra-cool super powers and will live longer lives which will seem that much longer thanks to time dilation. The next short person who asks me for help reaching something is going to get a vulgar hand gesture.

I'm going to lay down on the floor now so that time will start going slower for me. Being tall sucks.